When comparing Stencyl vs Corona SDK, the Slant community recommends Stencyl for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”Stencyl is ranked 5th while Corona SDK is ranked 24th. The most important reason people chose Stencyl is:

Power users can also write code in Haxe (similar to Actionscript 3) to create their own custom classes and extend the engine.

Pros

Pro

Haxe scripting available for advanced users

Power users can also write code in Haxe (similar to Actionscript 3) to create their own custom classes and extend the engine.

Pro

Cross-Platform

Publish iOS, Android, Flash, Windows and Mac games without code.

Pro

No coding required, great drag & drop interface

Visual scripting in Stencyl is based on the MIT Scratch project, which was designed to teach programming. Script elements fit together like puzzle pieces, ensuring that data and function types cannot be mismatched.

Pro

Great performance on every platform

Stencyl exports your games to native code so they have great performance on every platform.

Pro

The original concept for Ghost Song was created using Stencyl

The original concept for Ghost Song was created using Stencyl 3.x

Pro

Free

Corona SDK is completely free. That includes pro-tier plugins.

Pro

Very simple to use

Pro

Corona Simulator

Corona SDK ships with Corona Simulator, which runs your game/app directly on your PC/Mac and updates every time you make changes.It provides immediate feedback to your actions, you can see your changes right on the screen, without necessity to make build to device. Getting instant feedback really boosts tenfold prototyping and development speed.

Pro

Lua syntax

Uses the great and easy-to-learn Lua programming language.

Pro

Good documentation and lots of tutorials

Pro

Very comprehensive API

It's very quick to get things up and running with Corona SDK. The API is extensive and while it's not 100% feature-complete with the iOS API, it's close enough that you could create tons of games and never run into a roadblock.

Pro

Amazing learning curve

Corona does not throw photoshop-like madness full of buttons editor. You can go as fast as you want, learning and building game from ground up. Eventually, you'll learn how much corona is doing for you. But to start you don't have to master complex editor software. It's a great tool to learn to start game development if you want to learn how to program and make games. Your experience will be 100% transferable to any other Pro game engine.

Pro

Cross-platform desktop and mobile

Pro

Live builds - update builds running on a device automatically

With the live build feature, once you have created a build and installed on a device, you get lightning fast turnaround times because any change on the code or data is updated to the devices running the game (within the local WiFi) immediately. So changes can be tested on the real hardware within a very few seconds.What's even more impressive, this even works flawless with multiple devices running the game. You have to use it to learn how good of a feature this is while development and even more, while doing QA. Imagine fixing bugs and everyone of your QA team/friends/whoever helps to get your game done, has all changes on his device without doing anything but waiting 5 seconds - outstanding.

Pro

Content scaling

It's easy to create a game that looks good on many different sized mobile devices.

Pro

Marketplace for 3rd party plug-ins

Pro

Great community

Pro

Ability to call any native (C/C++/Obj-C/Java) library

Pro

Well supported

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Cons

Con

Updated

It needs much to improve for mobile games, it was left in the era of Flash games. In Android you can not even put the native keyboard, you can not access things like native camera, GPS or native text input.

Con

Only available via subscription

There should be an option to buy it outright, especially considering it is written by a one man team....this is not exactly an Adobe level enterprise with shareholders, so there is no excuse!

Con

Not a powerful engine

Should be used for basic games only.

Con

Slow release cycle

Con

Tile system is somewhat inflexible

Con

Making a device build requires internet connection

To build your app for the device (iOS/Android/AppleTV) Corona requires to fetch resources from online. This would include base application template and plugins. This allows not to perform local build or use Xcode or Android Studio to do a build. Even Large games/apps would build very fast with good internet connection.Your code never leaves computed. Corona SDK would transfer some information to determine which plugins and pieces has to be transferred in order to make a final steps in build.As a bonus - you get basically one button press to get from your Corona Simulator game to game on a device.

Con

Closed source

Since you don't have access to the code, you can't make changes to the SDK. You even have to implement workarounds on issues that have long been reported, but never fixed.

Con

Free, but not completely

Such conventional plugins as a reference to AdMob for example, cost $300 per year!

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